I Am Charlotte Simmons

By: Tom Wolfe

Narrated by: Dylan Baker

Length: 31 hrs and 43 mins

Publisher's summary

Dupont University: the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition....Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina, who has come here on full scholarship. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.

As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite, her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's god-like basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turn of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus, she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.

With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the '00s. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America's master chronicler.

©2004 Tom Wolfe (P)2004 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC

Critic reviews

• Audie Award Finalist, Fiction (unabridged), 2005

"Like everything Wolfe writes, I Am Charlotte Simmons grabs your interest at the outset and saps the desire to do anything else until you finish." (The New York Times Book Review)
"The book is brilliant, wicked, true, and, like everything Wolfe writes, thematically coherent, cunningly well plotted, and delightfully told." (Atlantic Monthly)

Passable

Very long and in need of editing, but Dylan Baker is a great reader and I finished it. Wolfe strikes out with his version of modern college life for an innocent but brilliant young girl.

felt like a sexist tootsie

I am beginning to find Tom Wolfe's insights very thin. Wolfe cannot reconcile his desire to write intelligent prose with his need to write unapologetically prurient, sexist scenes/banter. These are not conflicting aspirations in the hands of many a great author, but for Wolfe, they seem to be impossible to marry.

Further, the reader was awful to listen to. I actually listened to the whole thing because I couldn't figure out why it was such a best seller, and it felt like listening to an extended episode of Tootsie--Dustin Hoffman playing a southern woman. Again, charming and funny in the hands of a great actor, but in the voice of this reader it was almost unbearable. I couldn't stand it after a while and took a long break from listening to the book. His voices threw me out of the story over and over again.

I would be interested to see if the book is any better without the reader. However, I am not so sure this will help. While I am not easy to wrile as a woman, (I loved Mean Girls and Legally Blonde) the faux moralist, misogynistic message of this book bordered on offensive.

Boring and drawn out.

This was the hardest book to listen to I've ever come across. I liked the reviews, and the plot, as well as the author, but this book fell flat. There was no real plot, just a lost southern girl surrounded by too many weak characters. It was LONG and boring to listen to. What does a 75 year old writer know about going to college in these modern times? Nice try Tom, but I wish I could get my time and credit back.

not my favorite...

There is an ok story in here, but it is so incredibly long (and not in a good way) that you just want the thing to end. I feel like I could have skipped whole sections without missing much character development. And perhaps it's because I was listening to it, I noticed how redundant Wolfe was with his words: the words insouciance and solar plexus are each used at least a dozen times, and it feels like the same expressions are used over and over again.

Wolfe of course picks up on some important and edgy topics and he is brave enough to bring them to the public novel, but his perception of college life was incredibly shallow. Students might seem to be so stereotyped, destructive and ridiculous from someone floating just on the outskirts of modern college life, but Wolfe didn't convince me that he knew at all how a college student truly lives.

A rare miss for Wolfe

I love, love, love, Wolfe's essays and criticism, but alas, this book was a disappointment because Wolfe gets young women so completely, absolutely wrong.

He gets the young college women in wrong in so may ways. Where do I start?

Let's start with the wealthy roommates who are all "I HAVE to hook up with an athlete tonight!" I am going to be bold like Wolfe in his essays and go out on a limb and skewer a sacred belief right now. These young women who act like they are into sex for sex's sake, it is a lie. Wolfe paints the roommate character as wishing to drink and hook up for a good time's sake. It would be more realistic if the roommate character were portrayed as being extremely insecure instead of ruthless partiers. These young women drink to dull the feelings of low self-esteem, and to give themselves an "out" if they do meet a guy and hook up. I think they drink to escape all that noise in their head about judgment. Also, women like the roommate character are actually nicer to the Charlottes of the world than Wolfe portrays. Meanwhile, the Charlotte character is so haughty and self-righteous I wanted to smack her. In real life, the Charlottes of the world are way too savvy to be the goody-goody Charlotte acted like. I don't think there are any women on Earth as innocent, clueless, and un-savvy as Wolfe portrays Charlotte, and yet neither are there any as ruthlessly testosterone-driven (or if you will, sex-pursuing-for-its-own-sake) as Wolfe portrays the party girls. Read "Confessions of a Video Vixen" for how party girls really feel. They know they are being used and caught in a desperation cycle of low self-esteem and they have self-knowledge about it. I don't know how to explain all the ways Wolfe got young women wrong, but it just all feels off. Charlotte would know better than to moon around being such a sad sack. And the basketball guy would not fall for her, either

Hard to Listen To

The voices on this audiobook were simply annoying. I couldn't listen to much at a time, it was like nails on a chalkboard. I hear enough of my kids whining - I don't need it from fiction! It was not the content that bothered me, in fact, that kept me plugging away at it. I do like Wolfe. But I've never heard a preformance take away from a text to that degree.

Don't waste your time or money.

Would you try another book from Tom Wolfe and/or Dylan Baker?

I enjoyed Bonfire of the Vanities but this just plain $ucks.

What could Tom Wolfe have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

Cut it in half.

What didn’t you like about Dylan Baker’s performance?

Performance was fine.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Why did I waste so much time?

Couldn't stop listening.

Couldn't stop listening.

Disappointing

Not my favorite audiobook. It was a little too long, and seemed to drag on in most parts. I didn't care or the narrator either.

I am Charlotte Simmons (Unabridged)

I found this audiobook insulting in that the "f..." word was used frequently for the characters (teenagers)to make a point. This is not necessary and I would not recommend the story to anyone based on this type of language. Should the author had changed this to other ways of communicating his/her ideas that would be great. I really do not feel that I benefited from what I did hear. I feel I should be given another credit for another book as I wasted my time and cds.